The present invention relates to the field of conference calls and, more particularly, to the quality of experience (QoE) determination for multi-party VoIP conference calls that account for focus degradation effects.
In recent years, the use of Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) for voice communications has proliferated in both the private and corporate sectors. The success achieved by basic two-party VoIP communication, in terms of reliability and cost-savings, has encouraged multi-party (i.e., three or more party) VoIP conferencing products like SKYPE. Maintaining a good quality of experience (QoE) for the participants of the conference call is a priority and a challenge for multi-party VoIP conference call systems, as the QoE is typically directly related to use and revenue.
Conventional approaches to monitoring the QoE of a multi-party conference call utilize the same processes as two-party or peer-to-peer conference calls. Thus, conventional approaches fail to address differences in degradation factors between the multiple connections. That is, the network connection between User A and User B is subject to a first set degradation factors; the connection between User A and User C a second set of degradation factors; and so on.
Further, in multi-party conference call systems that utilize a centralized connection topology, these conventional approaches fail to take into account negative effects of the focus (e.g., the central point of control that all communications pass through) upon the QoE of the conference call. This centralized focus component transcodes a received signal before re-encoding and distributing the signal to the other parties. The transcoding process, therefore, affects the signal provided to a user, and, by extension, the QoE perceived by that user.